Western Exhibitions opens the 2008 gallery season with a solo show by Aaron Van Dyke in the Main Gallery and a two-person show by Dan Devine and Eugenio Dittborn in the Plus Gallery, which is the opening presentation in a year-long series �Dead Center / Marginal Notes� curated by John Neff. Both shows will open with a public reception on Saturday, January 12, 5 to 8pm.
In the Main Gallery
AARON VAN DYKE C-Side�-Deluxe Edition!
In the Plus Gallery
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn
AARON VAN DYKE C-Side�-Deluxe Edition!
One false beard worn over another, multiple sunglasses, three hats. In Aaron Van Dyke's recent "self portraits," the artist wears disguises over disguises. The effect is comic, but also psychologically troubling. Why would one possibly need a double disguise? A fake beard covers the face, hiding identity. But this transformation can be productive, the creation of a new character.
Van Dyke's works deal with redaction and its consequences. Redaction, most commonly a blacking out of textual information, is different than erasure. Redaction covers over, but does not obliterate, information. The artist's January 2008 show at Western Exhibitions will consist of large-format digital prints and sculptural work. Presented in multiple formats and media, the "redacted" prints use found text and imagery from a variety of sources, ranging from Department of Defense documents to classic rock album covers. Some of these prints are covered with clear caulk and hair. The sculptural works are covered with small prints smothered in layers of caulk. Van Dyke's methods in these pieces include multiple layers of redaction, black-white inversions, and the repeated use of Photoshop's "spray paint" tool to conjure references to gestural painting and radical chic of faux graffiti.
Van Dyke states of his new sculptures that he has "let go of the idea of making a coherent object. Instead, I am making sculptures that split and digress." This is true not just of the work's referential promiscuity, but also of its physical status. Both the sculptures and the prints are too large to be models, too small to carry out the function of their referents, stuck between being artworks and being only grounds for display.
The roots of these works are political in the sense that their incoherence and sloppy prettiness leaves us with the uneasiness of "rendering politics aesthetic" (which, Walter Benjamin warned, leads inevitably to war). The redactions also refer to repressed lines of discourse. Peter Frampton, one of the show's most prominent images, is included because of his ability to take one of the deepest philosophical questions (indeed, one might even claim the founding question in the study of subjectivity) and turn it into a party anthem. "Do you feel like I do?"
This is Aaron Van Dyke�s third solo show with Western Exhibitions. His 2005 show at the gallery was reviewed in Art Papers and Time Out Chicago. He has an upcoming solo show at the Rochester Art Center and his recent solo shows include the Kiehle Gallery at St. Cloud State University, Thomas Barry Fine Art in Minneapolis. Van Dyke is a 2005/2006 recipient of a MCAD/McKnight Foundation Fellowship and also runs an exhibition space, Occasional Art, with Peg Brown in St. Paul, where he lives and works.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn is the first in a yearlong series of exhibitions for Western Exhibitions' Plus Gallery curated by John Neff. Each show in the program will present one work each by two artists or a lone work by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal � directly or indirectly � with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The first show will partner a 1987 concrete-and-steel sculpture by New York State based Dan Devine with an Airmail Painting by the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn.
The Devine piece consists of a compact concrete block open on one side to reveal the outline of an auto engine part enclosed within; Dittborn�s work is an ultra-light collage painting sent to the exhibition site from South America via airmail. The juxtaposition of these works engenders a number of provocative contrasts between, for example: contraction and expansion, heaviness and lightness, stasis and movement. This list opens onto a number of subtler oppositions and inversions, some of which are explored in curator John Neff�s brief exhibition essay.
Dan Devine�s most recent solo exhibition, Inside Out Nascar, a follow-up to his widely discussed Inside Out Car of 1998, was held at Brooklyn�s Pierogi gallery in 2006. In 2003, a retrospective of Devine�s work was mounted at Hofstra Museum in Hampstead, New York. The artist�s work has been discussed and reviewed in Art in America and the New York Times, among other publications. Devine lives in Ghent, New York, where he recently presented the �living, self-sustaining� installation Sheep Farm.
Eugenio Dittborn has an extensive and illustrious exhibition history. He work has been shown internationally since that the 1970s at venues as diverse as Documenta IX, the Centre Georges Pompidou, P.S. 1 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Dittborn�s Airmail Paintings are held in major museum collections worldwide. The artist is represented by Alexander and Bonin gallery, New York. Dittborn is based in Santiago, Chile.
"Dead Center / Marginal Notes" series curator John Neff lives and works in Chicago. His artwork is represented by Western Exhibitions, where he will be presenting a solo exhibition in May of 2008. Neff's past curatorial projects have included "Hysterical Pastoral" at the Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art and "Cold Conceptualism" at Suitable Gallery, both in Chicago. His writings have recently been published in BAT Journal #5 and in the exhibition catalog Vincent Como: In Praise of Darkness.
